On the same day that potential 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton released an internet video endorsing marriage equality, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 58% of Americans approve of the idea. The country, liberals, conservatives and even myself have come a long way in an incredibly short time. That a majority of the country would support marriage equality was, not so long ago, thought to be impossible, at least in the near future.

I can remember a time, way back in the early part of the aughts, when even many committed liberals I knew had a problem with marriage equality. Some of this was simply strategic; at the height of Republican dominance of Washington and the electorate, was this really the issue to help put liberals back in power? Even if it was the right thing to do, they thought that focusing on it wasn't the right way to achieve the power to do it. On the politics, they were probably correct.

Still, many liberals were also seemingly genuinely discomfited by the thought allowing gay and lesbians to marry. Equal rights were fine, but there was nonetheless something problematic about that word, "marriage." Call it "civil unions." Call it anything else. To a great degree it was a failure to understand marriages as state supported legal contracts, concerned mostly with property rights and how to deal legally with the potential dissolution of those unions, rather than as historic institutions blessed by formal religious organizations. The core legal aspect of marriage is a civil union blessed by the state. The rest of it is ritual.

Culturally we see marriage as some combination of a religious ceremony and the last chapter of a romantic comedy. It's romance plus religion, and both have generally been focused on heterosexual relationships.

But men fall in love with men, and women fall in love with women, and there's no reason to disavow the romance of that. How religious organizations wish to embrace, or not, their role in blessing such unions is up to them, but the state should assert its role in granting the assortment of rights and obligations that it grants to heterosexual couples to same-sex couples as well.

I cried when Gavin Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco, instructed the county clerk to begin granting marriage certificates to same-sex couples. It was an act of civil disobedience, later overruled, but it was a beautiful act. I, like many others, sent flowers to random couples queuing up for their chances to be married during the brief window when it was possible. It was a moment when anything seemed possible, because for so long such a thing was seemingly impossible.

Since then, several states, either by legislation or judicial ruling, have legalized same-sex marriages. Many more couples have had the opportunity to legally marry, to have the state grant their relationships formal recognition.

After spending a bit of time "evolving," President Obama also finally succeeded to evolve on this issue. We'll never know the degree to which this evolution was politically motivated, or a genuine change of heart, but either way it signals that as a country we've evolved. This is reason to cheer.

I didn't know any "out" gay people, or, more correctly, people who were out to me, until I was about 25. Because of that, I had little understanding of the oppression and discrimination - both cultural and legal - gays and lesbians faced. I was open and tolerant, but stupid, and stupid enough to not really be open and tolerant. I didn't get it enough to really be able to claim that. It wasn't until I was a bit older that I had any sense of the reality of the difficulties for gay and lesbian individuals, past and present.

Fortunately, later in life, I was able to at least come closer to getting it. I befriended author, radio host, and activist Michelangelo Signorile, who taught me a lot both in conversation and through his writings. As the closet door continued to open, if slowly, I was exposed to more public discussion of these issues. As gay and lesbian individuals ceased to be invisible in public life, they increasingly ceased to be invisible in my personal life. Many, perhaps most, of my close friends now are gay.

Admittedly, many of those friends have been at best ambivalent about the marriage equality issue. Marriage wasn't an institution they felt especially interested in embracing, let alone making the central focus of their civil rights movement. But whatever the importance of marriage equality specifically, equality itself is certainly important. State laws outlawing same-sex marriage, along with the federal Defense of Marriage Act, explicitly enshrine discrimination against gay and lesbian couples in law.

In 2016, it is unlikely that any Democratic challenger for president will be against marriage equality. It's actually quite possible, though not certain, that this will be true of likely Republican candidates as well. The impossible has become possible, and we should all rejoice.

Duncan Black writes the blog Eschatonunder the pseudonym of Atrios and is a fellow at Media Matters for America.

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